Story Mode: the player has to complete numerous assignments to become the best groom

Timing & Gyro Challenge: console in your hands, train your foals on the lunge while turning on the spot

Your very own foal: the mere thought is utterly thrilling for many horse lovers. Let’s Ride: Best in Breed 3D can make this dream come true! There are over 25 different breeds to choose from, from rare Tersk horses out of chilly Ukraine to fiery thoroughbreds. The new 3D technology enables super cute yearlings to appear right in front of the player and eager for some fun times. With an Augmented Reality card, the Nintendo 3DS™can make the foal magically appear in the child’s room. Console in hand, train your equine treasures on the lunge while turning round on the spot. You can also attempt the animal obstacle course with your foal and practice elegant dressage moves. The new owners will soon learn that each of their sweethearts has its own endearing personality: for example, one may have a really sweet tooth, while another may love nothing better than a lovely roll in the sand. However, it will then be the players’ job to make their poppets shine like new pins! Once they are immaculately groomed, the foals can even enter beauty contests in Street Pass™ mode against other foals that just happen to be playing on other Nintendo 3DS systems nearby.

3 thoughts on “Let’s Ride: Best in Breed”

This game is just…terrible. Just. Plain. Terrible. The gameplay is pointless and has no end goal. Let me explain:

You begin the game picking out a foal from a group of around 20 breeds with about 2-3 colors in each breed. Nothing bad so far. You then take it to a stable that you are told you will be raising it in. You can interact with the foal in many ways, including bottle feeding, playing in the yard, training it on jumps, grooming, and so on. The foals are cute – a little unrealistic, but tolerably so.

Then the problems begin. From the start, you are bombarded by people bringing foals to you to “babysit” for a while and do whatever they ask, like playing a certain minigame repeatedly or feeding the foal a certain type of food. As soon as one foal goes home, another comes to take its place – this is CONSTANT. You barely have a spare second to care for your own foal, and the constant repetition of minigames quickly loses its appeal since the foals you babysit leave and you never see them again.

And then there’s actually dealing with your own foal. Your foal has a “maturity bar” that fills a little bit with every interaction you perform with it. This didn’t seem so bad, since the game said you could “breed and raise a stable of horses.” This implies that your horses can grow up and be enjoyed as adults, but this turns out to be false advertisement. As soon as your foal’s maturity bar fills up and it should grow into an adult, it disappears forever from the stable. Instead, it turns into an image in a photo album-like book of horses you’ve raised. This completely defeats the purpose of the game – caring for foals. Because you don’t want your foals to disappear, you’ll likely end up just ignoring them and caring for strangers’ foals, since caring for them will lead to losing them.

What in the WORLD were you thinking, THQ?! This game is designed in a way that encourages you NOT to play it! Good graphics and 3D effects are just not enough to redeem the other garbage that makes up this game. This concept could have been great, but unfortunately it fell fall short of its ads and its buyers’ expectations.

This game is mostly about washing your foal. Not enough time is given when you are training your foal before he gets dirty, so you have to bring him back to the stable to wash him again. When he grows up, he is taken out of the game so you cannot use his character any more. But the graphics are cute.